Now Apple is getting a taste of its own medicine as HTC has filed a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) asking for all iPhone, iPod, and iPad imports be halted.

Posting on the HTC website, Jason Mackenzie, vice president of North America for HTC stated:

As the innovator of the original Windows Mobile PocketPC Phone Edition in 2002 and the first Android smartphone in 2008, HTC believes the industry should be driven by healthy competition and innovation that offer consumers the best, most accessible mobile experiences possible. We are taking this action against Apple to protect our intellectual property, our industry partners, and most importantly our customers that use HTC phones.

No detail has been given as to what specifically HTC is complaining about, but Gizmodo believes it is five patents relating to power management, personalized phone dialling, and a telephone dialler with easy memory access.

In the press release HTC does point to the fact it has been making smartphones and innovating for over a decade. Software, design, and form-factor are all referenced in the HTC release suggesting it could be going after Apple on all fronts and not just those five patents.

With each company suing the other this will either drag on or end in an agreement to disagree.

Both companies must believe they have a case they can win, but this could end up in embarrassment, royalties, and a large payout if either Apple or HTC has got this wrong. That’s assuming this does actually go to court, but I can’t see any negotiations happening because of the competition between them.

If I was a betting man then I’d say that Apple has possibly underestimated HTC and the patents they have. Apple took action first, but HTC may have a nice patent portfolio to call upon in case something like this happened. It didn’t waver when Apple sued and just pointed to a number of firsts it had achieved including a Windows PDA in 1998.

We also need to remember that HTC recently signed a patent deal with Microsoft covering all Android phones. There may be some overlap between the patents Apple says HTC is infringing and those it has licensed from Microsoft making this even more messy.

This is certainly going to be interesting to watch over the coming months.